I went into Farewell with my expectations way too high. I can see that now. My wife and I love (good) espionage thrillers and we were pretty damn bored in this film. We got duped by the preview, which was really well done, carefully crafted to hide the film’s shortcomings. In actuality, they made every mistake in the book.

The first problem is that they decided to tackle the story from every angle, like a bad made-for-TV drama. This was completely unnecessary. The inclusion of the American side of the story – complete with a highly distracting performance by Fred Ward as Reagan – kills the momentum of the espionage story and needlessly dilutes the viewer’s invested energy and attention. They needed to decide: is this movie a history lesson, or is it an espionage thriller? They thought they could do both, but they couldn’t.

In espionage thrillers it comes down to two things: trade-craft detail and the sociopolitical impetus of the character’s actions. And both of these rest in large part on the quality of the dialog. So we’re back to my fundamental problem with modern movies: filmmakers just don’t write any dialog these days, and their films suck as a result. This is a movie about a political system being brought down from within by one of its own. What they needed to be talking about was the system itself and why the Russian traitor felt it needed to come down, preferably in a way that highlighted the irony that Russia now (20 years after its liberation from Communism) is a nightmare of murderous thugs, a fucking cesspool of organized crime, sex-trafficking, and worse. They also needed to talk about how these two guys managed to accomplish everything they did in a system that was set up to neurotically spy on itself. These two concepts are really interesting – why not spend time on them?

Instead, we get a proliferation of throw-away lines like. “After today, I’m done! I can’t put my family in danger any more!” “The old system needs to come down. There will be a new start.” “You tell those ass-holes I want out now!” “I say when we’re done! We’re gonna do this my way or not at all!” It’s just plain boring. At the end of the movie, Dafoe (playing the head of the CIA) mentions that the Russian traitor operated in a way that flew in the face of all the rules of espionage. Really? Now THAT would have been fun to see in the film!

There are almost no interesting details on how their information exchange system actually worked, or what problems they faced. Instead the filmmakers are obsessed with the fact that the French dude brings the Russian guy romantic French music from the west, and brings Queen tapes for his son. They waste all this time on the Russian guy’s affair (which in the end has nothing to do with anything,) on establishing the fact that he’s not going to leave his wife, and on his dull relationship with his son. They waste five minutes as we watch the son sing along to a Queen tape and play broom-stick guitar in the middle of some field. Please! Then they shift gears and we see Reagan making some member of his staff watch cowboy movies with him, or scenes showing the French and the US engaging in “hissy fights”  because they don’t like to share information. Who gives a fuck!

Think about a really great political thriller like The Lives of Others. There was NO wasted motion in that film. Everything supported the details of the action or the underpinnings of the character’s motivations. Did they go on huge tangents about how the playwright was flirting with some bimbo down at the drugstore? No. Did they spend 1/4 of the film examining the West German reaction to the article he writes, and the inane recreational proclivities of the West German president? No. They stayed focused on the story! Period!

Then there is the casting. It is a huge problem that the dude playing the French intermediary is really bad. He has a pretty good look about him (which really helps sell the preview, I might add) but his performance is not very good. The guy playing the Russian traitor is okay, passable. But honestly, you never bond with either of these guys, and how good can a political thriller be if you never bond with any of the main characters? How good would Three Days of the Condor have been if you didn’t really like Robert Redford and didn’t overly care if he lived or died? I rest my case.

This film is in very limited release (we saw it at Sunshine, in NYC) and it is not out on video. I’m willing to admit that my disappointment in this film may partly be a function of unrealistic standards on my part. There’s worse stuff out there, to be sure, but on it’s own it sure doesn’t amount to much.